Why IE6 Continues To Ruin My Life

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Via a good friend, this post confirms that many of us are in the same situation: corporate IT people force users to stay in IE6 which forces, in turn, all of us developers to suffer by having to support it. The post, written from an inside Digg perspective doesn't tell the whole story so I’d like to add one dimension. Many corporate environments are in this unfortunate cycle based on the inability to project abstract costs, that is to say that often (always?) software is rushed through and “finished” in an agile, YAGNI kind of way, and after the fact managers¹ have a hard time capturing the costs it takes to support legacy browsers because of “finished” software. The two development efforts are seen as separate, so the extra time in new development doesn’t factor into the decision to keep what is old.

Cheers for Virtual PC and the ability to test things out without having it installed locally but nevertheless I’d like to force everyone to upgrade and forget that browser ever existed.

Side note, if you are fortunate enough to force an upgrade, here is some help.

¹I’m sure special kinds of managers are able to guess this in and make good decisions but they are a rare breed and the elixir they drink is hard to find.

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